It’s hard to imagine that a Penn State alum on Penn State’s coaching staff could be considered the outsider.
But that’s life for cornerbacks’ coach Terry Smith.
To be sure, he fits right in with James Franklin and the rest of the gang, but a rarity on the staff as a coach who did not make the trip from Vanderbilt to Happy Valley. Instead he made the short drive up from Philadelphia where he was coaching at Temple.
Having played for Joe Paterno in the early 1990s, Smith knows what the program is all about, but he wasn’t going to join just any coaching staff that made the call for his services.
“When you look at coaching staffs, when a new coach goes and takes over a program, I always look at how many coaches did he take from his last program,” Smith said late last week just outside of Pittsburgh. “And you look at certain programs in our conference who didn’t take any. You look at how many coach Franklin took with him and the support staff behind the scenes that also followed him, and to me that says a lot about not only who coach Franklin is but the people who came with him.”
If Smith was looking for a coaching staff that sticks together, Franklin’s certainly fits that bill. Bob Shoop and Herb Hand may have both entertained the notion of taking other jobs, but opted instead to stay with a coaching staff and support staff that has turned Penn State into Vanderbilt-north.
It doesn’t mean that nothing will change between now and the end of the Franklin era, but Smith liked what he saw and felt comfortable putting his name on the latest attempt to bring Penn State back to national relevance.
“I wanted an opportunity to be with a group of guys that aren’t fly by night guys who aren’t going to just get up and go for any job opportunity,” Smith added. “That want us to build something special. I want us to be back to National Championship caliber and I felt that this was the right group of guys to get us there and the stability is what we’ve known for so many years at Penn State and we have to get back to that stability.”
The experience so far has been what he hoped it would be. That probably isn’t hurt at all by the fact Smith is working alongside Shoop, who is perhaps one of the best defensive coordinators in college football. Beyond that day-to-day lifestyle, Smith is pleased with how his time at Penn State has gone. It’s what he hoped for and it’s something he’s proud to be a part of.
“It has been awesome,” Smith said, reflecting. “It’s a great group of guys, we all have the same vision and same work ethic. We’re all a little bit different personality wise which is good, so we all kind of mesh but it has been fantastic. There is not one guy on our staff who is the outcast, it’s just a bunch of good guys with the same vision.”
So maybe Smith isn’t much of an outside after all.
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